Alan Clarke

For other people with the name, see Alan Clarke (disambiguation). For the British Conservative politician, see Alan Clark.
Alan Clarke
Born (1935-10-28)28 October 1935
Wallasey, Cheshire, England
Died 24 July 1990(1990-07-24) (aged 54)
London, England
Occupation Film director

Alan Clarke (28 October 1935 – 24 July 1990) was an English television and film director, producer and writer.

Life and career

Clarke was born in Wallasey, Wirral, England.

Most of Clarke's output was for television rather than cinema, including work for the famous play strands The Wednesday Play and Play for Today. His subject matter tended towards social realism, with deprived or oppressed communities as a frequent setting.

As Dave Rolinson's book (see 'Further reading', below) on Clarke details, between 1962 and 1966 Clarke directed several plays at The Questors Theatre in Ealing, London. Between 1967 and 1969 he directed various ITV productions including plays by Alun Owen (Shelter, George's Room, Stella, Thief, Gareth), Edna O'Brien (Which of These Two Ladies Is He Married To? and Nothing's Ever Over) and Roy Minton (The Gentleman Caller, Goodnight Albert, Stand By Your Screen). He also worked on the series The Informer, The Gold Robbers and A Man of Our Times (but not, as Sight and Sound once claimed, Big Breadwinner Hog). Clarke continued to work for ITV through the 1970s but now made much of his work for the BBC. This included pieces for The Wednesday Play (Sovereign's Company 1970), Play for Today and Play of the Month (The Love-Girl and the Innocent, 1973 and Danton's Death, 1978). Distinctive work for these strands included further plays by Minton including Funny Farm (1975) and Scum (further details below), but also Sovereign's Company (1970) by Don Shaw, The Hallelujah Handshake (1970) by Colin Welland and Penda's Fen (1974) by David Rudkin. He also made To Encourage the Others (1972), a powerful drama documentary about the Derek Bentley case, the case which was later dramatised in the 1991 film Let Him Have It by Peter Medak, and several documentaries, including Vodka Cola (1981) on multinational corporations.

A number of his works achieved notoriety and widespread criticism from the conservative end of the political spectrum, including Scum (1977), dealing with the subject of borstals (youth prisons), which was banned by the BBC, and subsequently remade by Clarke as a feature film in 1979 (the original television version was eventually screened after his death). His 1982 television play Made in Britain, starring Tim Roth (in his television debut) as a racist skinhead and his negative relationship with authorities and racial minorities, was based on a screenplay by David Leland. He directed the feature film Rita, Sue and Bob Too written by the working class writer Andrea Dunbar and released in 1987.

Clarke's work in the 1980s is fiercely stark and political, including the David Leland plays Beloved Enemy (1981) on multinational corporations and Psy-Warriors (1981) on military interrogation. But he also directed David Bowie in Baal (1982) for the BBC, part of Clarke's interest in Bertolt Brecht. His film work became more sparse, culminating in Contact (1985) on the British military presence in Northern Ireland, Billy the Kid and the Green Baize Vampire (1985), Road (1987) and his short film (lasting only 40 minutes) Elephant (1989) which dealt with 'the troubles' in Northern Ireland and featured a series of shootings with no narrative and hardly any dialogue; all were based on accounts of actual sectarian killings that had taken place in Belfast. The film took its title from Bernard MacLaverty's description of the troubles as "the elephant in our living room" – a reference to the collective denial of the underlying social problems of Northern Ireland. His final production, The Firm (1989), covered football hooliganism through the lead character played by Gary Oldman, but also the politics of Thatcher's Britain. In 1991 a documentary on him Director Alan Clarke by Corin Campbell-Hill aired on British TV.

Personal life

Clarke died on 24 July 1990 after suffering from lung cancer. He was 54.

Clarke's son is Gabriel Clarke, an award-winning sports journalist with ITV. His nephew John McMinn is managing director of Musicteam Limited, a UK-wide music publishing, production and performing arts company.

Cultural influences

Musician Annie Locke[1] was a close friend of Clarke for many years, and they worked together on The Love-Girl and the Innocent. After Clarke's death, she wrote a suite of pieces in his memory, entitled "A Man Called Alan".

Clarke inspired a generation of actors, writers and directors, including Paul Greengrass, Stephen Frears, Tim Roth, Ray Winstone, Gary Oldman, Danny Brocklehurst and Iain MacDonald. Filmmakers Harmony Korine and Joel Potrykus[2] have cited Clarke as a major influence on their work. As documented in the series The Story of Film by Mark Cousins, the 2003 movie Elephant by Gus Van Sant about the Columbine High School Massacre was named after and influenced by Clarke's earlier work of the same title, especially by Clarke's penchant for long take tracking shots, often following one or more characters from the rear as they move through space. Critic David Thomson has observed, "No one has ever grasped the central metaphor of cramped existence in walking as well as Alan Clarke."[3]

References

  1. ↑ "Annie Locke profile | Inner Harmonies Music". www.innerharmoniesmusic.co.uk. Retrieved 2016-07-27.
  2. ↑ "BOMB Magazine — Joel Potrykus by Nicholas Elliott". bombmagazine.org. Retrieved 2016-06-30.
  3. ↑ The New Biographical Dictionary of Film, David Thomson, Knopf, 2014

Further reading

External links

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